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Monday, November 26, 2018

Redesigning Reality

Creating Humanity,

What will we choose to sacrifice and create as the last of the industrial empires enter terminal decline? Across the globe connections are breaking and new spaces are being created, often with great violence. The demands of the old system exceed the Earth’s capacity and with every passing year, more and more people will be searching for new solutions. We must discover new ways to sing to one another and build our utopias not as end goals but as practices through which we can learn how to better take care of one another. We must create it together, in all our diversity, to give new meanings to the way we live.It is our historical moment to be such a generation, to live amidst such immense forces of change. The high priests of our system fiercely deny this and demand ever more blood sacrifice from us to end the eclipse of their infinitely growing future. The very logic of their organization precipitates their extinction. However, if we embrace our position, balanced between destruction and creation, we can begin to create harmony amidst the crescendo of the old world. We live amongst dinosaurs. The meteor is coming. We must learn to be warm blooded, how to flower. Will our successional ecology be a golden age or a toxic one? The choice will be ours.

There’s a hidden battle I think is taking place. A battle for the future. Whether or not it will have a soul... Capitalism is an algorithm... The algorithm of capitalism goes like this. Maximize profits, minimize costs, erase anything that stands in the way. It’s not complicated, it’s not subtle — and there is absolutely no room for human judgment in it... So we get by now that the Facebook algorithm makes us crave fake friendship, constantly dislodging our sense of inherent worth — and the YouTube algorithm tempts us with the most incendiary and extreme videos around. But all this misses the point — the “algorithm” of a “company” is just one expression of the larger algorithm of capitalism. Facebook’s and Youtube’s and Twitter’s algorithms are so noxious, so disappointing, so harmful — and so threatening to democracy, civilization, reason, by way of attacking our self-development — because they are all really the same thing: capitalism’s algorithm... True freedom begins with the absence of control — which is to say, it is just as much freedom from needing, wanting, hoping to abuse, exploit, demean, harm as it is freedom from suffering them. So all this is about you, becoming someone who transcends this old, decrepit way, which has gone on too long now in human history — this way of being trapped by pleasure, inside systems of domination, great algorithms for controlling human minds, desires, thoughts, possibilities, by doing violence to others, and calling that freedom. And that means that you are going to have to the difficult work of developing a soul. If that is, you want the future to have one, too.

​Why 536 AD was the worst year in history to live on earth (all other things being equal...)

A cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland created a huge cloud that resided over most of the northern hemisphere for 18 months.The eerie fog caused an unrelenting dusk persevering throughout day and night.Effects on the climate were so severe that the Irish chronicles tell of 'a failure of bread from the years 536–539'.Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2,300 years.

This introduced a period of economic ruin which would steadfastly remain in place until a century later.

In the decades of meteoric economic growth that followed the war, plastic began the inexorable rise that would see it replace cotton, glass and cardboard as the material of choice for consumer products. Thin plastic wrapping was introduced in the early 1950s, displacing the paper and cloth protecting consumer goods and dry cleaning. By the end of the decade, DuPont reported more than a billion plastic sheets sold to retailers. At the same time, plastic entered millions of homes in the form of latex paint and polystyrene insulation, vast improvements over pungent oil paint and expensive rockwool or wood fibre panels. Soon, plastic was everywhere, even outer space. In 1969, the flag that Neil Armstrong planted on the moon was made of nylon. The following year, Coke and Pepsi began replacing their glass bottles with plastic versions manufactured by Monsanto chemical and Standard Oil. “The hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all,” wrote the philosopher Roland Barthes, in 1972... “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life,” wrote the economist Victor Lebow in 1955. “We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing pace.” ...Plastic provided the perfect accelerant for this radical change, simply by being so cheap and easy to throw away. Just a year earlier, in 1954, Lloyd Stouffer, the editor of the trade journal Modern Plastics, was mocked in the press when he told an industry conference that “the future of plastics is in the trash can”. By 1963, he addressed the same conference fully vindicated: “You are filling the trash cans, the rubbish dumps and the incinerators with literally billions of plastics bottles, plastics jugs, plastics tubes, blisters and skin packs, plastics bags and films and sheet packages,” he crowed. “The happy day has arrived when nobody any longer considers the plastic package too good to throw away.”Plastic meant profit.​...​If plastic is a microcosm of all of our other environmental problems, then following that logic, so are the solutions. In just a few short years, scientific evidence of the environmental damage done by plastic has spurred people to organise, pressured governments to regulate, and even been noticed by fossil fuel corporations. Customers asked for less packaging at the supermarket, and within a year BP was predicting that, as a result, by 2040 the industry would be producing 2m fewer barrels of oil per day. Our obsession with plastic has registered. In the much larger battle over climate change, the plastic backlash could end up being a small but energising victory, a model for future action.This means facing up to how interconnected the problems are: to recognise that plastic isn’t just an isolated problem that we can banish from our lives, but simply the most visible product of our past half-century of rampant consumption.

Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini just declared himself the leader of the Europe’s future. He refuses to budge one inch in negotiations with the European Union over Italy’s budget now threatening to take down the government.And in doing this he not only speaks for Italians, he is now speaking for that growing part of the European population who sees what the EU is morphing into and recoiling in horror.Protests in France over Emmanuel Macron’s new tax on diesel have turned violent. The British leadership has completely betrayed the people over Brexit. They may win this battle but the animosity towards the Britain’s leadership will only grow more virulent over time.As the core leadership in France and Germany fades in popularity, held in place because of domestic political squabbling, Angela Merkel and Macron are ratcheting up the rhetoric against the rising nationalism Salvini represents and are now pushing hard for their Federation of Europe before both of them leave the scene in the next few years, at best.​..

​Don’t think for one second that Salvini doesn’t know what the real story behind Italy’s debt is and who is hurt worst by exposing it to the vicissitudes of the market. At this point he’s daring Draghi to stop supporting Italian bond yields.Let yields rise. Let’s find out who is behind the insolvent Italian banks swimming naked as the tide rolls out, liquidity dries up and the whole European debt market seizes up.And if it’s Goldman again then then expect the biggest fight yet for the future of the EU. If Salvini plays it right, Italeave not Brexit becomes the clarion call for ending the Davos Crowd’s push for global control.

Have the Americans been on the Moon or it’s just a hoax as conspiracy theorists claim? All questions will be answered when the Russian cosmonauts visit the Earth’s satellite, Russia’s space boss, promised.“We’ve set such a task – to go there and check if they were there or not,” Dmitry Rogozin joked in response to the popular question about the moon exploration. “The Americans say – they’ve been there. We’ll verify that.”

Thanks Wigs (We're used to a lot more varnish on the truth, from both the POTUS and Congress. What about Gabbard's Army Reserve Commission?):

Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) has mocked US President Donald Trump’s commitment to remaining allied with Riyadh in the wake of journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s death, calling the president “Saudi Arabia’s b*tch.”...On Wednesday, Gabbard tweeted that “being Saudi Arabia’s b*tch” is not the kind of “America First” foreign policy that Trump promised during his presidential campaign.Gabbard, who is an Iraq War veteran herself, opposes the knee-jerk use of the US military in foreign conflicts. She clashed with former president Barack Obama on his Syria policy, suggesting that the US and its allies were pushing for regime change in the country but ignoring the potential consequences. She has also spoken out against the US arming anti-government fighters in Syria, many of whom turned out to be jihadist extremists.

Turkish newspaper Hurriyet Daily News said on Thursday the CIA has a recording of a phone call in which the crown prince gave instructions to "silence Jamal Khashoggi as soon as possible." The possible existence of such a tape could put Trump in an awkward position if its contents are leaked given his consistent defense of MbS amidst the scandal and growing calls for accountability.

​I​t was packaged as a stark, graphic message, echoing across Eurasia: Presidents Erdogan and Putin, in a packed hall in Istanbul on Monday, surrounded by notables, celebrating completion of the 930 kilometer-long offshore section of the TurkStream gas pipeline across the bottom of the Black Sea.This is no less than a key landmark in that fraught terrain I named ‘Pipelineistan’ in the early 2000s. It was built by Gazprom in only two and a half years despite facing massive pressure from Washington, which had already managed to derail TurkStream’s predecessor, South Stream....Now juxtapose this developing entente cordiale between the Bear and the (aspiring) Sultan with the gripping drama in Istanbul...

The consensus among the AKP leadership – confirmed by independent Left academics – is that the US-Israel-House of Saud-UAE axis is deep in negotiations to extricate MBS from any culpability.That includes key items in the hefty Erdogan “package” dangled to the axis to essentially buy Ankara’s silence – an end of the Saudi blockade on Qatar and the extradition of Fetullah Gulen, described across the Turkish political spectrum as the leader of FETO (the Fetullah Terrorist Organization).

The big prize is no less than the leadership of the Islamic world.​..​The Erdogan machine has sensed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to simultaneously bury the House of Saud’s shaky Islamic credibility while solidifying Turkish neo-Ottomanism, but with an Ikhwan framework.

​Sister Caitlin in Oz points out that we accept horrors and genocide as normal, which is the big problem.​ Whoever did 9/11, WE are doing this as a result...

And amid all the fist-shaking and rending of garments about the killing of one man by the Saudi government, a far less magnetic story has been published saying that about 84,701 Yemeni children under the age of five were starved to death between April 2015 and October 2018. And I say “were starved to death” instead of “have starved to death” because their starvation is the direct result of a blockade and relentless violence by Saudi Arabia.​..​I mean, take 9/11. Pretty bad, right? 2,996 dead human beings. If that were engineered or permitted to happen by any faction of the US government or any of its allies, that would be pretty diabolical. But would it be worse than a million Iraqis killed in a war based on lies? Even if you only care about American lives, just the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq already far exceeds the death toll of 9/11. This was a war engineered by secretive government agencies and DC insiders, justified and sold to the public with government lies, lies which were advanced as objective and unquestionable fact by the mass media. The war was rammed through without any public accountability, a million human lives were snuffed out, and when they were done nobody was tried for war crimes. Nobody was even fired. No changes were ever made to prevent such horrors from being inflicted upon our world again.On paper, I’d say that’s far worse than 9/11. Yes, I know the two are related, but just looking at the objective facts of those two occurrences, one is clearly more egregious an offense than the other, regardless of what specifically happened on that September morning.

Zionist Supremacism – The Right to Kill for any Reason Chosen​ (That's the same right America and allies claimed since WW-2. Thanks Eleni.)​Israel admits its submarine sank Lebanese refugee boat during 1982 war

​The US can use white phosphorous to burn eyes, mouths, flesh and lungs because we didn't sign that ban. See? OK. Thanks Eleni.

Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons prohibits the use of the chemical weapon in areas populated by civilians. However, the United States is not a signatory of Protocol III.

The recent alleged bombing of a Syrian town with white phosphorus by munitions is the fourth time the U.S.-led coalition has been accused of using the banned substance in the village of Hajin just since September. On Oct. 29, and a few weeks prior on Oct. 13, local sources reported the use of white phosphorus by coalition jets in Hajin.​..​

Unfortunately, the U.S.-led coalition has been using white phosphorus in combat operations long before September. In fact, the use of white phosphorus had become so commonplace that a New Zealand general that worked with the coalition openly admitted to its use in Iraq’s Mosul in an interview with NPR. The coalition also used the banned munitions in its efforts to take the Syrian city of Raqqa from Daesh in June of last year.

​These guys only get the right to do anything to anybody if they blame it on Assad. They missed that fine point this time...Over 100 civilians were hospitalized, including dozens of women and children, after anti-Assad militants unleashed a wave of mortars filled with poison gas on government controlled Aleppo Saturday evening.Syrian state-run SANA published multiple photos and video of victims in the city's hospitals being treated for what's reported to be chlorine gas exposure. Though it's not the first time that 'rebels' seeking to topple the Assad government have conducted a chemical attack on pro-government areas according to United Nations findings, it is the first time that mainstream American outlets like CNN and Reuters have featured coverage of such events.

2 comments:

I did NOT mourn President George H.W. Bush's death on account of the Iraqi war. At his funeral several insinuated he went to Heaven. No, says I. There is too much 'oily' blood on his hands to permit entrance to such a place. I did like his 'thousand points of light's campaign. RIPGeorge

George H.W. Bush had a life of lies, hiding his crimes for money and power and lust. The rituals that were performed are not ones that can absolve that life. Is there reincarnation? Of what? Of who? We all need to look for ways to reduce the suffering in this world.